Keeping Housing Affordable for Greenville County Residents: The Role of Greenville County Redevelopment Authority

Today on Simple Civics, we’re looking at Greenville County's pressing affordable housing crisis and the vital role played by the Greenville County Redevelopment Authority (GCRA). This conversation, featuring Joe Smith, GCRA's Executive Director, and Francisco Arnaiz, GCRA’s Program Manager, illuminates why finding an affordable place to live in Greenville County is a struggle for so many – from young families and veterans to college students and seniors on fixed incomes.

The common misconceptions about affordable housing are swiftly debunked; it’s not "Section 8 housing," but instead can feature quality amenities like quartz countertops and stainless steel appliances, comparable to market-rate products, but designed to cost no more than 30% of your income. This episode makes it strikingly clear that securing decent, safe, and affordable housing is a universal need, yet an increasingly uncertain challenge in our rapidly growing community.

Discover how GCRA is strategically leveraging federal HUD funding and local dollars to bridge crucial gaps in housing development. They partner with non-profits like Habitat for Humanity, transforming underutilized properties into stable homes for essential workers, like a North American Rescue packer or a Target stocker, who are the backbone of our community but may not be high on the economic ladder. This isn't just about building houses; it's about fostering stronger communities and ensuring everyone has a place to thrive. The discussion touches on the inherent "poverty problem" that intertwines with the housing crisis, emphasizing the dual responsibility of providing opportunities and pursuing stable employment.

This episode highlights the complex dynamics of Greenville's growth, offering both candid assessments of the challenges and a hopeful vision for a community designed for everyone. Joe Smith, a lifelong resident, shares his unique perspective on Greenville's evolution from a textile hub to a modern economic center, underscoring the enduring work ethic that makes the community "unstoppable" when united.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Simple Civics: Greenville County for more essential discussions impacting our community!

Transcript

Katy Smith: Simple Civics listeners, before we get into today's show, we want to invite you to a party. We're celebrating our 200th episode of Simple Civics Greenville County with a special live recording. We hope you'll drop by the studio on Tuesday, June 24th between 8:30 and 10 a.m. We will be featuring questions from listeners and we invite you to share what's on your mind. Visit SimpleCivicsGreenvilleCounty.org for the details and to sign up. This episode of Simple Civics Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit GreenvilleFirstSteps.org slash free books. That's GreenvilleFirstSteps.org slash free books.

Katy Smith: Young families, single parents, veterans just out of military service, college students starting their first jobs, retirees on fixed incomes, the many people working jobs that pay $20 an hour or less. These are the people struggling to find a place to live in Greenville County that they can afford. Working to solve this problem is the Greenville County Redevelopment Authority. Since 1974, GCRA, as it's called for short, has worked to improve the living conditions of the county's residents by building new homes, rehabilitating existing homes, and improving the infrastructures within communities. They believe every resident in Greenville County deserves a chance to own or rent a home that fits within their budget. I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode of Simple Civics Greenville County, I talk with Joe Smith, Executive Director of GCRA, and Francisco Arnaiz, Program Manager, who will discuss why this matters and the vital and creative role that GCRA plays to leverage federal and local dollars to get more places built or rehabilitated for the seniors, families, and workers in Greenville County to call home. Today, we're going to discuss how to make sure we have places for people who work in Greenville County to live that they can afford. And I'm so glad to have two experts on to talk about it with me. Joe Smith, Executive Director of Greenville County Redevelopment Authority.

Joe Smith: Thanks for having me on today.

Katy Smith: And Francisco Arnaiz, Program Manager.

Francisco Arnaiz: Thanks for having me on today.

Katy Smith: Anyone who has lived in Greenville County for a while and is looking to buy a home or rent a place knows this is a very hot market and it's hard to find something that meets your needs for location and quality that also meets your price range. In other words, housing that is affordable. We have touched on the topic in several episodes over the last three years with different folks, so I would like to start with how you define affordable housing.

Joe Smith: We define affordable housing as any housing that's only costing you 30% of your income. Anything that's over 30% would be considered too expensive for your budget.

Katy Smith: Finding a place to live that costs no more than 30% of a budget is hard for everyone these days, but especially those people who are making less than 80% of our area median income, which is true for almost half the people who live in Greenville County. I mean, these are the folks who work as firefighters. They're in law enforcement. They may work in health care as an LPN or a medical receptionist. They may wait tables or clean hotel rooms or work in child care classrooms. Having had a chance to chat with you two before we got started, I feel like you both represent all the wonderful dynamics of Greenville County, and you've seen the challenges we have before us. Francisco, I'd love to hear from you what you've observed as a newcomer to Greenville County about our challenges and opportunities as it relates to affordable housing. And then Joe, as a long timer, would love to hear from you. So let's start with you, Francisco.

Francisco Arnaiz: So me, my wife and my daughter at the time, now I have a son also, we visited because we have family out here. My wife's family's out here and we thought the place was beautiful. We thought wow, we can hang out downtown, we can walk around, we can do all these things. It's so green, the weather's great, it's hot but it's great, right? So we fell in love with the place and so now we lived here and we barely had a chance to get here because prices were going up so fast.

Francisco Arnaiz: And so even as we were able to do that, we knew that we were privileged to be able to do that, right? To pick up and leave one place to come to another place. But it's rapidly changing, right? It's even more unaffordable now than it was three years ago. We have the privilege to be able to absorb costs, right? And when we came here, housing wasn't affordable for us for the first year because I was working and we had a new son. So my wife was home. And so housing cost burdened, how much of my check was going towards my rent? A lot. Like, I would have been on the chart of like, this is severely housing cost burdened. So it was unaffordable for us. And so, but I meet people who have had the privilege and they've had the chance to be able to grow up here and be here and get to live here. And someone gets to stay home and be with the kids, right?

Francisco Arnaiz: Coming here now, that's impossible. Like two people have to have a job. And this goes back to affordability. And so what opportunities and challenges are there? I think the challenge is how do we keep Greenville County, how do we keep it a place for everybody? What do we need to do so that it doesn't change beyond recognition, right? Because I know, and I've only been here a short time, that it's something really worth preserving. What does that look like in terms of opportunities? When we're talking within the context of affordable housing, or around issues of homelessness, or around issues of funding supportive services or other community needs and community services, the market doesn't provide for that, right? It's not designed to do that. So our responsibility is to keep up as best as we can with the market to preserve what we know is important, but not just for us, but for everyone that's here, right? Because we can see what's important to us. And so we know like those same good things are important to everybody here. And so it's our responsibility, if we can do something about that, to do that for everybody, right? To preserve the good thing that we have.

Katy Smith: So Joe, you've lived here your whole life and you've seen a lot of change. I wonder how you would answer that question.

Joe Smith: I love to hear the perspective of the newcomers. I've had the wonderful privilege of living here all my life, working here all my life. That's always been home base. And the opportunity that's still here and continues to grow, it's like it's exploded in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years or so. I remember when the cotton mills were still running, and we were the textile center of the world. And we had Textile Hall out there with the runway right beside it so if executives could fly in and see the latest and greatest in whatever cotton loom we had to show off. We had all the ancillary businesses that ran off of that and the community among all of the textile crescent. And seeing that go away. And then we had to reinvent ourselves. And then, you know, when Hitachi came.

Joe Smith: And BMW came, and Michelin came before those, and how we took this hardcore workforce that we had in Greenville, people who just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and just go to work and do the job, and that's just what you do. You grind, and you go to work every day, and that work ethic and that toughness, and it's still there under the surface here now, and the newcomers that have come in, a lot of them have the same thing, and I love that because why? Because we're unstoppable when we're all together, all on the same page going forward. When they see that we have a workforce here that is well-educated, that is willing to go to work every day, well, that's something that you've got to get some pride in you, some gravel in your craw, as we used to say in the South. And that sustains you through some ups and downs we have. Why does GCRA need to be in the affordable housing realm? It's because if we're not there, you're not going to have a whole lot of affordable housing built because the market's going to drive it in a different direction. That's going to leave some people behind. I'm reminded of a quote, and I know my staff is sick of hearing me quote this. It just says, if we don't build a community for all of us, we won't have a community fit for any of us. And it's a riff on Teddy Roosevelt, which is one of my favorite conservationist presidents who had some vision. And I hope we got some vision left in Greenville, which means that, no, we're going to have a community for everybody.

Joe Smith: And that's what GCRA, that's what we're going to try to bring every time we show up. We're going to try to bring expertise, a better way to fix a problem, and we're always going to be a voice for somebody who needs to, we need a home, we need a home for you to own, we need a home for you to rent, we need a home for you, you need to age in place and we need to fix your house so you can continue to stay there. And oh by the way, the senior center over here, we need to cobble together some money and put an elevator in, which we did that in Mauldin and we got some money from here, yonder and there and all of a sudden we've got enough money to put the elevator in. So that's the kind of stuff we do. It's important work. I think we do really solid, good work with a small staff, and we're worried about our money, and we'll get it from somewhere, and we'll make it work, and we're going to show up and show out.

Katy Smith: Okay, so let's talk about the way you show up in affordable housing. Others we've had on the podcast on this topic have noted how people think affordable housing looks a certain way, or it's a certain size, or it's located in a certain place. Can you talk more about that?

Joe Smith: Certainly. That's a misnomer. You know obviously the housing that we produce, and it's able for people to go out and look on all sorts of sites to see what we build, and I stack it up against any other regular market rate product. So yeah, you may not have granite countertops, you may not have tile floors, but you've certainly got quartz countertops in place. We've got a stainless steel appliance package in it and we have vinyl plank flooring in it. So you drive by and I challenge you to look at it and say oh, that's affordable housing or the other term was Section 8 housing. We don't do Section 8 housing. Well, no such thing. You go and look at what we build, it's comparable to anything that comes out of the regular housing production companies.

Francisco Arnaiz: Joe hit the nail on the head. When I think of affordable housing, so there's a couple of different elements. So, you know, per HUD's definition, right? And HUD likes to make definitions of things. That's where that 30% number comes from. But if we think outside of the definition, just in regular life, like you make a certain amount of money, you pay a certain amount for how much it costs to rent or to own. And so affordability is a concept of, you know, outside of the numbers, what are you paying? What are you budgeting with your money? And how much do you have after you're paying what is necessary? And then housing, of course, you know, also from HUD, this idea that should be decent, safe, and affordable, right? Affordable housing. Those are the criteria. And so, anything that we're investing in, whether it's new construction housing or repairs, decent, safe and affordable. And so, you know, it goes back to just housing and what having somewhere to live and somewhere to be safe and somewhere to have a family, what it means to everybody. And I think that's universally important. So when you bring in the concept of affordable, I mean, beyond that number, it's just, you know, what is it?

Francisco Arnaiz: Where does it land budget-wise for you to feel like you have enough and that your housing is stable, predictable, and isn't stretching you beyond your means in which you then have to make sacrifices?

Joe Smith: Francisco, you know, summarized it perfectly. It's affordable to what works in your budget. And a lot of people don't have a lot of budget. We have a whole lot of income period. But they're such valuable members of our community that we need to have a place to house them fairly close to where they work. Because not only does that affordable housing component come in, the transportation piece comes in with it. And so we have all these community pressures from somewhere to live, how to get to work, that I've got a job that is stable, that I can work this job. And a lot of our folks don't work one job, they're working three, just to be able to make ends meet, just to be able to make that rent payment. Because a lot of them aren't on subsidized rent payments. A lot of them are trying to pay this market rate rent, which is where we run into all the pressures we've had with the eviction process. GCRA operates a rental portfolio. We have a portfolio of only about 111, 112 units or so. We have a lot of seniors that are living on the ragged edge of a social security check, and that's all they've got. It's $1,500 or less a month. So it's tough for them to pay a third of that income to be able to live in there, and then you always have pressure from medicine and food and everything else that goes with it. And not everybody can afford to pay $10,000 a month in a nursing home. I mean, these are real facts, folks. It's just this is where our community lives.

Katy Smith: So we have a dozen or so entities in this community that deal with housing in some way, which can make it a little confusing for a listener who are either looking for a place to live or who want to support making more places for people in the community to live. I'd love for you to describe the role of Greenville County Redevelopment Authority and how you fit in this larger spectrum.

Joe Smith: We are the overreach that monitors and helps fund a lot of our nonprofit projects. How we fit in with a home ownership provider, Habitat for Humanity, for instance, we donated four lots to them, and they built four houses, and two of them are occupied now.

Joe Smith: And one of the ladies that's occupied that project works at North American Rescue, and she spends her days packing boxes of rescue supplies, so pretty critical job to have, right? Well, she's gotten a, now has a home for her, I think, three kids there. They're all in school obviously and she's just a few miles from where that job is so it's great for her for transportation to get to her job and you're raising a family and it's in the school systems and you know it's an affordable home that she's able to do that. Different project, Habitat project once again, a home ownership project, it's over in the Berea section of town. A lady got a house over there, she has three kids, they're all in schools locally, Legacy Charter, I think, Greenville High School. She works at Target. She stocks shelves at Target. Very proud of her job, does a great job, accolades and does that. If somebody doesn't stock the shelves at Target, you don't have anything to go pick off the shelf when you go to Target and shop. And so here we are, we're providing housing, home ownership housing, for some of our folks who are not high up on the economic ladder.

Joe Smith: So the rental projects that we've helped fund, those we get the density that we need, the quantity that we need because we all know we need a lot more housing than what we have. Home ownership's the toughest piece you do because you got to have the dirt to put the house on and dirt's challenging obviously, cost of dirt, locating it, getting it done. The rental piece that we do when we partner with partners like NHE who come to us with a deal and we are able to fill in some of the gaps so that they're able to offer a much lower rate for a three-bedroom, two-bedroom unit. And so that somebody who, once again, some of our folks that I just mentioned, other folks like that who aren't ready for home ownership yet, but they can get into a affordable rental unit and still be able to build credit, hopefully build some savings, hopefully take advantage of first-time homebuyer programs when they're ready, when they've got enough time on job, when they've maybe gotten a promotion or two, and they're not making $8 an hour, they're making $12, and then they're up to maybe $15, $17. They're at something that's reasonable. I think, and we haven't run the numbers lately, or if I did, I've certainly forgotten them. I think if you're around $35 an hour for two people, one person or two people, totally up to about $35 an hour, you're somewhere close to where you can afford market rate rent. I think that's very, very low to be able to afford that. It's just not a lot of money, particularly after the tax man takes his bite. And so what you're left with is not a whole lot for anything left over after you pay the rent. We had a housing study done years ago and a guy came in and said, you don't have a housing problem. You got a poverty problem.

Joe Smith: Yeah. Yeah. So that's the onus is on both hands here. Number one, we got to provide you an opportunity for affordable housing and then the responsibility in the community is yeah you got to get a good solid job so if you want to start out here you got to get to somewhere better in order to own a home and that's great because we see it happen all the time. Give you another, it's not anecdotal, this is true story, another one happened. We had some property donated to us by the parks and rec folks in Greenville. This has been I don't know five, six years ago, time flies, right? So we got five lots in Slater Marietta area. It was an old park, it was underutilized and so they said can you guys do something with it? I said yeah, I built five houses on them. It's already kind of had the lots already laid out and we built five houses and we sold I think three of them right off the bat. One of them was to a sheriff's deputy, great story there. So they moved in, think they're still there. And then we had two houses we couldn't sell them right off the bat so we rented them. And then out of that fact, one of the renters finally decided, yeah, I think I want to buy it now. And so we converted it to homeownership.

Joe Smith: And then the other house, they said, well, we bought a house somewhere else. So they got in a position where they could buy. We're going to buy one somewhere else. And then we turned around and sold the house to somebody else after that. So now instead of some rental houses up there, we've got five homeownership units to folks that are, I think we had a teacher in the bunch. I know we had a sheriff's deputy in the bunch. And the other folks are working decent jobs. Once again, that's solid homeownership. You got skin in the game because now you got a house that's yours. And it makes for a great community there.

Katy Smith: So let's get really specific then about GCRA. How do you all function and how do you provide affordable housing?

Francisco Arnaiz: Greenville County receives funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. We're called an entitlement community because you receive funding directly from Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD. Other smaller cities and counties go through the state agency, SC Housing. So we are the administrator for HUD funding in Greenville County. GCRA receives an allocation every year of funding for affordable housing, funding for homelessness, and funding for things like public facilities, infrastructure, public services, things like that. And so we have this direct funding from HUD.

Francisco Arnaiz: Other organizations that are working in the same space and kind of after the same mission will come to us to be awarded money for their project or awarded money for their program. So we take the funding that we're allocated, we put it out in the community in order to serve typically low to moderate income residents. And in Greenville County, approximately 40% of all Greenville County households are under the 80% area median income level. What we are providing is serving families, senior households, people experiencing homelessness, people trying to avoid becoming homeless. And so that's a little bit our flavor of, you know, where we are in the affordable housing community development space.

Katy Smith: So what I'm thinking of, as you described that, is that we have our federal government that has money to help communities make sure housing is available and you all administer it, which is really just a lovely way of letting a local entity put our federal dollars to work. Because you guys know who the right players are here that could help a family own a home or help a senior with limited income find a safe rental. Or you know who the players are who can build it in the way that works in our community. So you kind of take that federal approach and localize it with your expertise, right?

Francisco Arnaiz: Right. And so one thing to point out about the various programs that we receive from HUD, Home Investment Partnerships Program is for the creation or rehabilitation of affordable housing, whether it be housing for homeownership or housing for rental housing.

Francisco Arnaiz: That allocation is only a million dollars. As everyone knows, a million dollars isn't going to get you much. If we're talking about building homes, we can maybe build four homes. If we're talking about building an apartment complex, we could probably build one fiftieth of an apartment complex. So the money that comes from HUD is typically given with the understanding that local communities need to come up with their own local funding sources for these programs. Even for homelessness programs, we receive about $240,000 for homelessness prevention, addressing and preventing homelessness. We receive about $2.3 million for infrastructure, public services, public facilities. It's small amounts of money. So our charge is to see how far we can use that money and what we can leverage to get projects off the ground and to support nonprofits in the community. We can provide consistent funding, right? We check that, we evaluate the program, we evaluate who's being served. We look at what's being proposed. How many people do you plan to serve? Where are you going to find these people? What are you going to provide them with? So we do a pretty thorough evaluation process annually to those that are applying for funding.

Francisco Arnaiz: And so a lot of our funding is going out into the nonprofits in the community that are offering, you know, anything in the homelessness space, addressing preventing homelessness, funding for shelters, funding for rental assistance, things like that. In the development space, the same thing. We're funding gaps in development sources for housing. So we contribute a small amount to bring a project from not fully sourced to fully sourced, have enough funds to build. And then in the community development space, senior programs, after-school programs, Meals on Wheels, you know, at our recent county finance committee, we saw that these are organizations that are providing services that council members choose to fund. And so we fund those same things, right? These things in the community that people need, but it's not a market-driven funding source for it, right? So we fund that spectrum of organizations, too. And then anything we're doing internally.

Katy Smith: Well, I'm so glad to be connected to you both and the passion and heart that you bring to this really important technical work. Thanks so much for joining me.

Francisco Arnaiz: Thank you so much for having me.

Joe Smith: It's a great opportunity to meet you, and just thanks again for having us on.

Catherine Puckett: Simple Civics: Greenville County is a project of Greater Good Greenville. Greater Good Greenville was catalyzed by the merger of the Nonprofit Alliance and the Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy. You can learn more on our website at greatergoodgreenville.org.